Good afternoon, friends, and welcome to the Wesak festival. This festival of the Buddha, the great Eastern festival observed by millions of Buddhists at the full moon of Taurus, is the high point of the spiritual year. It marks the culmination of humanity’s spiritual aspiration. When one understands, even in a small way, the significance of this festival and the tremendous alignment of spiritual energies that it calls forth, it evokes one’s highest spiritual aspiration—the response of one’s innermost being, the soul.

Wesak is an event re-enacted each year in the form of an alignment which is well described in the books of Alice Bailey. The alignment generated extends, the Tibetan says, even beyond the Buddha and the Christ to certain Spiritual Beings who seek to aid our little planet. In accordance with the great axiom "As above so below", the Buddha at Wesak acts as a planetary mediator between these great Spiritual Beings and the planetary Hierarchy for whom the Buddha serves as the Lord of Light. Within the planetary Hierarchy, three Masters from each of the seven ray ashrams are designated to cooperate in the creation of the alignment made by the Buddha and the Christ with still higher Spiritual Beings in preparation for an opportunity for service. Particularly at the hour of the full moon of Wesak, which comes tomorrow morning at 6:26 am, these 21 Masters from the seven ray ashrams, together with the Buddha and the Christ, band together to prepare a channel in consciousness for the inflow of powerful spiritual energies.

But this channel still needs the responsive cooperation of the disciples of the world and the new group of world servers to act as a medium of transmission, as a bridge, to the intelligent, thinking men and women of goodwill and particularly those who work in some way to enhance the communication of ideas—those who work knowingly or unknowingly to build the network of light linking human minds.

The great question mark is the response of the world’s disciples and the new group of world servers. Viewed from the Hierarchy’s perspective, the difficulty of igniting the cooperation of these people is multifaceted and challenging. There is the factor of too many demands on people’s time, as well as all the many diversions that call upon our attention. And at no time in history does it seem there have been so many opportunities to divert our attention from what really matters spiritually. There is the factor of inadequacy—the sense of being alone, isolated and too insignificant to make a difference even if one would like to help. Tied in with this, is the possibility of sensing, dimly, the enormity of the opportunity that Wesak offers and feeling overwhelmed by it, as if standing in the path of a dam that has just burst. And there is the indifference of the personality which, left to its own preferences, tends to choose to pursue fulfillment of the five (or is it six?) senses which feed into an endless circle of self-focus.

All of these possibilities can impede the cooperation of the world’s disciples and the new group of world servers, but those of us here today have chosen to cooperate, in some small way, and we know we work not alone but in conjunction with our fellow meditators who are gathering, as we are, in groups large and small throughout the world to take our place in the creation of a channel whose extremities, both above and below, we cannot measure. But we are told that with our cooperation, this channel will be able to reach into the lower kingdoms that are in our care and thus permeate our planet with the life-bearing potency of Shamballa—the energy of the will-to-good which the Buddha brings each year at Wesak.

Adding to the opportunity we have is that the full moon tomorrow coincides with Passover and that this will be the first of two full moons in Taurus. This year is one of those rare occasions when there are two full moons in Taurus, the last time being in 1989. When we think back to that year, we remember Tienanmen Square where riots took place in May 1989, followed by the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the whole restructuring of the Eastern European political structure, culminating in the collapse of communism. So it’s an auspicious occasion to work with the energy flow of two Taurus full moons. Added to all that, the Pope is in town! Let us acknowledge the alignment now underway worldwide and take our place within it, visualizing the assembly of Spiritual Beings, the Buddha and the Christ, the 21 Masters and the Hierarchy, and the world’s disciples and members of the new group of world servers. Let us say together the Affirmation of the Disciple.

I am a point of light within a greater Light.
I am a strand of loving energy within the stream of Love divine.
I am a point of sacrificial Fire, focussed within the fiery Will of God.
And thus I stand.

I am a way by which men may achieve.
I am a source of strength, enabling them to stand.
I am a beam of light, shining upon their way.
And thus I stand.

And standing thus, revolve
And tread this way the ways of men,
and know the ways of God.
And thus I stand.

As I mentioned, the disciples and members of the new group of world servers are the great question mark for Hierarchy in the creation of the alignment or channel called for at Wesak. This is hinted at in the keynote for our work in meditation during the three spiritual Festivals this year: When a human crisis and a hierarchical crisis coincide, an hour of opportunity emerges. Let the group respond. Our meditation on this seed thought is an invocation, not an assurance: "Let the group respond." What exactly should the group respond to? Some clarity emerges when one compares the present time to the period in which the Buddha lived and taught some 2500 years ago. Karen Armstrong, the comparative religions scholar, has written of that period, known as the Axial Age, a time spanning roughly 800 BC to 200 BC which was pivotal to human evolution. It wasn’t a global phenomenon but rather, confined to four regions of the world: India, China, Iran, and the Eastern Mediterranean including the Jews and Greeks.

The very name for this period—Axial Age—suggests the pivotal point humanity had reached, particularly in those regions of the world. So critical was it that Karen Armstrong says, "The Axial Age marks the beginning of humanity as we now know it." The birth of the modern world came out of sweeping changes that arose from a deep discontent and dissatisfaction with life and with the traditional guideposts by which people had lived for generations. Does that not sound like the present time? Out of a period when people felt they had lost their spiritual moorings, developments came that led in time to Taoism and Confucianism in China, to Buddhism and Hinduism in India, monotheism in Iran and the Middle East, and Greek rationalism in Europe.

But at the time there was no sense of what great outcomes would follow. People only knew the old ways no longer brought spiritual fulfillment. The Ageless Wisdom would probably also point out that this was a time of culmination for the age of Aries, whose keynote is "I come forth and from the plane of mind, I rule." Humanity was awakening mentally, as symbolized in the Greek myth of Prometheus, who brought fire to mankind, fire symbolizing the mind, a sacrifice for which Prometheus paid dearly. The sense of self, of individuality as distinguished from simply being part of the tribe, took root in those societies affected by the Axial age, and it led to deep searching and aspiration, but also a sense of fear and of unfulfilled need.

The Buddha came into the world in this period, and he too experienced the emptiness of life as it was traditionally supposed to be lived. Born to every comfort and privilege life offered, he found life devoid of meaning and went in search of its significance. Finally, after years of experimentation with various spiritual practices, he sat down under a bodhi tree determined to achieve enlightenment, and there he stayed for 40 days and nights until, on the night of the Taurus full moon, he achieved his breakthrough. And at the moment of his enlightenment, he touched the fingertip of his right hand to the earth in demonstration of the grounding of spiritual energy, the energy of Light, on Earth.

This was the breakthrough the Buddha achieved, and every year since then, the Ageless Wisdom says, he returns to Earth at the full moon of Taurus to renew the charge of spiritual energy. This energy is the force of Shamballa, the centre where the Will of God is known—known by the light of the mind. Upon his enlightenment the Buddha determined to share his realization with struggling humanity, and for the remainder of his life, which lasted some eighty years, he traveled and taught throughout India. As in the case of Christianity, the religion which grew out of the Buddha’s teaching has taken on quite a number of contours that he probably didn’t foresee. But if one narrows down the Buddha’s teaching to the core principles we know he taught, they are few in number but not easy of attainment. He laid them out in his first sermon to the fledgling group of disciples that heard of his breakthrough, and they are known as the Four Noble Truths. The first is that life is dukka. Often this is translated as "life is suffering" but dukka means something slightly different: out of joint, dis-eased or without ease, off balance, or out of alignment. The second truth is that the cause of life’s dislocation is the drive for personal fulfillment which fosters selfish desire. Third, the cure for this is the overcoming of the drive for a separate, independent existence apart from the whole. And fourth, the way to achieve liberation from selfishness is the Noble Eightfold Path which begins with right values and ends with right happiness or right concentration: from the dislocation caused by selfish personal desire to the concentration of spiritual energy in a life lived in union with the whole.

The prevailing sense that "life is dukka", out of alignment, was the source of a powerful crisis that made the Axial Age pivotal in human evolution. And now, 2500 years later, we are again living in a time when life seems "dukka"—out of balance, as if we've lost our center. And we have, in as much as we human beings live more and more for self-fulfillment and less and less for the common good, the good of the whole. Yet, increasingly people are waking up to this misalignment and trying to find a return to the center of life. The imbalance demonstrating in the climate crisis is a siren call that cannot be ignored.

Added to the human dimensions of the present crisis is the teaching of the Ageless Wisdom that says the Hierarchy of Masters and the Christ are also undergoing a fundamental crisis. "Crisis", it should be pointed out, doesn’t just mean the emotional disturbance of the frustrated personality but the attainment of a point of tension powerful enough to generate a fundamental choice and change. For the Hierarchy and the Christ, this is generating the crisis of return to externalized, active presence on earth after many centuries of working behind the scenes. The coincidence of the Hierarchy’s crisis pending their return to an outer presence on earth, and humanity’s crisis generated by its growing awareness of dislocation, of being "off centre", is a tremendous opportunity, our seed thought says. "Let the group respond."

How shall we respond? Interestingly, we find a clue in the problem of the self. As Karen Armstrong points out, the Axial Age societies were driven by an urge to develop the self, to push beyond its accepted boundaries in development, which we recognize as a step forward in evolution out of mass consciousness, but which also left them without the guideposts of the past and with a growing awareness of the selfishness this emphasis on self-development fostered. That’s why the Buddha taught the "three poisons" of life: greed, ill will, and delusion. The material pursuits people craved brought misery and violence and fostered a loss of values. These wrong goals set up a false lodestar that people followed which only deepened their misery. Comfort and pleasure don’t fill the spiritual void, as we in the affluent nations know all too well.

Yet the worth of the self was also recognized by the Buddha, for he constantly taught the need to rely upon oneself as the only dependable spiritual guide, testing out one’s beliefs for oneself to see if they "worked"—if they led to greater happiness. He emphasized no particular spiritual doctrines or scriptures, believing that the emphasis should be placed on liberation from suffering. Perhaps he understood that testing one’s beliefs through direct experience was the most successful method because such a practice built a platform one could stand on—a foundation for taking the next step and the next in one’s spiritual evolution—step by step, and always through self-effort and self-reliance.

In fact, the Buddha’s last sermon culminated in his command, "Be a lamp unto yourselves. All composite things decay. Work out your salvation with diligence." This is often taken to signify an essential darkness or depressive quality to Buddhist teaching, but I think this is a misunderstanding. If we remember that the Noble Eightfold Path culminates in Right Concentration, that implies the cure for selfish living. It’s found in mergence with, or concentration of forces with, the whole. All composite, separated things decay. Salvation is found when the self is "snuffed out," the Buddha said. That again is often misunderstood to imply the death of the self or soul. But another interpretation is to say that when the separated self is no longer fed the oxygen it needs to keep blazing, Nirvana is entered. Nirvana is the state of being "snuffed out," meaning the boundaries of the separated self have vanished through union with the whole. That state of liberation is expressed in one of the names for the Buddha: the Tathagata, meaning "thus gone". All private elements have disappeared in one who has entered the "ocean of being’.

This is the state of Nirvana, which the Buddha said is unconditioned. He refused to describe it, because, he said it is "incomprehensible, indescribable, inconceivable, unutterable." He could only point to it by stressing the need to follow the dharma—one’s spiritual duty or obligation, and the discipline—of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path.

Always, he emphasized the value of the spiritual community as a source of strength in following the spiritual path, and this the Tibetan affirms. "The discipline of group life is a higher living discipline than any self imposed ideas of life and truth", he said. "When a disciple sees and relates his individual dharma and his group responsibility—then he can take right action."

In moments of crisis, when right action may not be all that clear, we have the Buddha’s assurance that we can be a lamp unto our own feet if we take refuge in the dharma and the discipline of the spiritual way. And we have the example of the Christ, whom the Tibetan calls the Buddha’s brother. Of Christ it’s said "As he is, so we are in this world." That is the powerful essence of World Saviors such as the Buddha and the Christ, for Avatars of their level anchor spiritual potencies on earth that become a lasting legacy for all humanity to come. The Light anchored by the Buddha and the Love embodied by the Christ are now the property of our planet, an intrinsic part of what it means to be human—for "As he is, so we are in this world." But—the Buddha commanded us not to be stupid sheep, following blindly what we’ve always been told, in the deep ruts of inertia and habit. The gift of the present time, a time of dukka when everything seems off-center, is that it offers the opportunity to change, to recognise a new and better way to live which will raise and lift all the kingdoms, human, animal, vegetable and mineral.

All the wisdom gained by the Buddha and expressed in the Forces of Enlightenment, is re-charged each year when the Buddha returns to Earth bringing the "touch of Shamballa" to quicken human minds and hearts. The opportunity of Wesak is so beautifully described by the Tibetan that I’d like to close with his words:

"What we are seeking to do is to carry forward a group endeavour which is of such moment that, at the right time, it will produce, in its growing momentum, such a potent magnetic impulse that it will reach those Lives Who Brood over humanity and our civilisation, and Who work through the Masters of the Wisdom and the assembled Hierarchy. This group endeavour will call forth from Them a responsive magnetic impulse which will bring together, through the medium of the aspiring group, the overshadowing beneficent Forces. Through the concentrated effort of these groups in the world today (who constitute subjectively One group) light and inspiration and spiritual revelation can be released in such a flood of power that it will work definite changes in the human consciousness and ameliorate conditions in this needy world. It will open men's eyes to the basic realities, which are as yet only dimly sensed by the thinking public. Then humanity itself will apply the necessary correctives, believing it can do so in the strength of its own sensed wisdom and strength; yet all the time, behind the scenes, stand the grouped world aspirants, working silently, in unison with each other and the Hierarchy, and thus keeping the channel open through which the needed wisdom, strength and love can flow."

So let us work in meditation at this high moment of the spiritual year.

WESAK FESTIVAL

Sarah McKechnie
New York,
April 19, 2008